Product Description

How does language work? How do children learn their mother tongue? Why do languages change over time, making Chaucer's English almost incomprehensible? Steven Pinker explains the profound mysteries of language by picking a deceptively simple single phenomenon and examining it from every angle. That phenomenon - the existence of regular and irregular verbs - connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and humanities: the history of languages; the illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak; the sources of the major themes in the history of Western philosophy; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the living brain. Pinker makes sense of all of this with the help of a single, powerful idea: that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105849 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Steven Pinker has a very good ear; you know it instantly from his prose: elegant, accessible and very witty indeed. In Words and Rules, Pinker picks apart our language to reveal pro found truths about how we think.

Do we deduce rules from the world around us and behave rationally? Or do we free-associate, discovering the world through experience and creative analogy? The obvious answer is "both". But proof of the obvious answer has long eluded philosophers of mind. Pinker, though, believes he has found it--in the English past tense.

English verbs come in two flavours. Regular verbs have past tenses that look like the present-tense verb with "-ed" on the end--today I walk, yesterday I walked, etc. The second kind of English verb is irregular. Irregular past tenses follow no rules--today I buy, but yesterday I bought; today I hold, yesterday I held.

The way children distinguish between these different sorts of verbs as they learn to talk suggests they learn both by rule and by association. Proving this is Pinker's task--and it's a bravura performance.

It takes nothing away from that other recent lit-hit, Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, to say that Pinker's book achieves an altogether deeper level of profundity. It says much for Pinker that in doing so, he can still match Bryson for wit and readability. --Simon Ings

Amazon.co.uk Review
At least until very recently, the human brain was a black box. The only way we could see how it worked, was to look at how people acted--and listen to what they said.

Steven Pinker has a very good ear. You know it instantly from his prose: elegant, accessible and very witty indeed. In Words and Rules,Pinker picks apart our language to reveal profound truths about how we think.

Do we deduce rules from the world around us and behave rationally? Or do we free-associate, discovering the world through experience and creative analogy? The obvious answer is "both". But proof of the obvious answer has long eluded philosophers of mind. Pinker, though, believes he has found it--in the English past tense.

English verbs come in two flavours. Regular verbs have past tense forms that look like the present-tense verb with -ed on the end. Today I walk,yesterday I walked. The second kind of English verb is irregular. Irregular pasts follow no rules. Today I buy, but yesterday Ibought. Today I hold, yesterday I held.

The way children distinguish between these different sorts of verbs as they learn to talk suggests they learn both by rule and by association. Proving it is Pinker's task--and it's a bravura performance.

It takes nothing away from that other recent lit-hit, Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, to say that Pinker's book achieves an altogether deeper level of profundity. It says much for Pinker that in doing so, he can still match Bryson for wit and readability. --Simon Ings

From the Publisher
The new book by one of the world's scientific superstars
How does language work? How do children learn their mother tongue? Why do languages change over time, making Shakespearean English difficult for us and Chaucer's English almost incomprehensible? Why do languages have so many quirks and irregularities? Are they all fundamentally alike? How are new words created? Where in the brain does language reside?

In WORDS AND RULES, Steven Pinker answers these and many other questions. His new book shares the wit and style of his classic, THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT, but explores language in a completely different way. In this book, Pinker explains the profound mysteries of language by picking a deceptively simple single phenomenon and examining it from every angle. That phenomenon – the existence of regular and irregular verbs -- connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and humanities: the history of languages; the theories of Noam Chomsky and his critics; the attempts to duplicate human language using computer simulations of neural networks; the illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak; the peculiarities of the English language; the sources of the major themes in the history of Western philosophy; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the living brain...

Customer Reviews

Narrower than 'The Language Instinct' but thought provoking
This is probably of less interest to the general reader then the deservedly popular "Labguage Instinct" in that it concentrates attention nearly all on regular and irregular verbs. However it still includes many very fascinating ideas about language and the brain and how they both reflect the nature of reality.

Pinker's basic premise is that the brain has the two different ways of working expressed in the title of the book- words and rules. In showing why he thinks the observed data are best explained by this dichotomy he covers the history of language, how language is processed by the brain, and two opposed theories of language: Chomsky as opposed to the distributed parallel processing model - see it is a little technical!

I am glad Pinker explains Chomsky because I am sure I would never be able to read him myself, even though I studied language at university. I also enjoy the way he writes, which is often funny, and hardly ever dull; and I find his scientific method and views on language and other matters to be both dispassionate and revealing.

I am hoping he will soon publish something else equally or more interesting.

A godsend
This is a truly brilliant book, in terms of both content and form, which should be in every library. Steven Pinker has the marvellous idea of presenting language and linguistics in the round by concentrating on all the different aspects of regular and irregular verbs. So you get both breadth and depth at the same time, oh so rare in pop science books. Essential for anyone who wants to understand -- and really understand -- language a little more.

Laboured presentation of a limited subject
I was very impressed by the Language Instinct and the Blank Slate, but this book was not a joy to read.
Essentially, the material (how humans acquire facility in a language with its perverse mix of rules and exceptions) is only sufficient for an extended essay. Pinker stretches it to book length with large amounts of anecdotally presented "experimental data" on how people make judgments on rules and exceptions, especially in relation to noun plurals and verb past forms in English and German. These anecdotes are far too slow and repetitive to be entertaining, and in general the material could have been considerably condensed to great benefit.

Ultimately the book is unconvincing, because it is far from clear that conclusions based on the behaviour of English and German speakers would generalise to speakers of highly inflected languages, or speakers brought up on a non-inflected languages. Furthermore, the English of the book is US English, and some of the author's conclusions on specific points are contradicted by usage in other major dialects of English.

The writer foolishly tries to take the high ground on usage of Latin and Ancient Greek loan words, and, through imperfect knowledge of those languages, commits several solecisms (or at least would be considered solecisms on this side of the pond).